Dulce Et Decorum Est (Wilfred Owen Piece)
by Kkaebsong
Summary: Based on 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' & 'Apologia Pro Poemente Meo' by Wilfred Owen, this short monologue explores the truth of war. Couldn't find a poetry section, so I put it here. Forgive me!


**_A/N:_****Hey guys, how's it going? This is a piece that I wrote for my A2 English class, but it was never entered. I'm pretty proud of this one, so I thought I may as well post it up and see what you guys think. It's based on the poems '_Dulce Et Decorum Est_' and '_Apologia Pro Poemente Meo_', both by one of my all-time favourite poets, Mr Wilfred Owen. He was a soldier in the first world war who was shot to death in France exactly 1 week before the war ended, but many of his poems are known by many. This is a dramatic monologue, so there are some minor stage directions. **

**I find it a little hard to talk about how I felt writing this piece, as I don't know how I managed to get into the narrator's head so well, but apparently, this one was passed around my English teachers and made them all feel really sad, so there we go, emotive writing, folks. It really does work. It's a bit of a depressing one, but I wanted to mirror how the poems discuss war. Anyway, I'm rambling, so I'm going to go now. I hope you enjoy this piece as it's probably one of the best things I've ever written.**

**-Kkaebsong**

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_(A light flares on to illuminate a man wearing army fatigues, his arm in a sling and a bloody bandage around his head, visible below an ill-fitting cap, medals gleaming on his chest. His boots are still flecked with mud despite showing signs that the unidentified soldier had attempted to polish them many times.)_

If you ask me, 'war' and 'glory' should never appear in the same sentence – it's the same with 'death' and 'happiness'; some things you just don't talk about, but verbalising such terrible times is said to help the world, to prevent the same things from happening again. To purge the soul. Let us test that theory, right here. Right now.

_(He pauses for a moment, then continues.)_

My grandfather was a soldier; my father, too. Passing the baton down, I suppose you could say. I call it hereditary bad luck and pure stupidity. But that's what we do, don't we? Make the same mistakes over and over and _over _again; say we don't want our children to suffer as we did, yet guide them to the same abysmal path that we walked ourselves.

We all started out eager, ready to fight for King and country, convincing ourselves that we were ready to see and hear and do things that no human should ever experience. The nightmares that plagued me, that haunt me still and probably will for the rest of my cracked and damaged life, are always filled with shouts of "GAS! GAS!", the firing of mortars, trench rats and that one corporal. We threw him into the wagon and trudged behind, walking the walk of the war weary. He writhed like a serpent, eyes rolling, searching for a solid object to land on, blind. Later, we discussed the moment that we knew he was dying, caught between horror, sadness and a smug frustration that he hadn't fitted his mask properly in the first place. It was like the Devil was whispering to us that whole time in France: '_There you go, you've successfully outlived another of them. Aren't you happy? What a time to be alive!_'

Innocence – yet another term that many associate with war, although for many different reasons. Each country will believe to the roots of their souls that the powers that be in their fair land are the innocent ones; in truth, it is the soldiers from all sides who are the pure ones. We are lapdogs, sent to do the dirty work by those who wish to retain spotless hands. But the blood always snakes its way back to their palms. Those who take the guns and the bombs and murder are guilty only of following orders, for fear of their own lives being snatched from them like a rug being ripped from under their feet. Desperation and the overwhelming urge to survive does a lot to man when faced with a fork in the road.

_(A handkerchief is pulled from his pocket and wiped across his forehead, fingers moving as though to rake through hair that is hidden beneath the bandage.)_

But you get to a point when you have strayed too far to the edge of the cliff and the line you've been toeing and you begin to tumble over, grabbing at roots and rocks to stop you from falling only to find that your hands come up empty; and that mud, that blasted mud, everywhere and nowhere all at once, mixing with the blood and the liquid guilt and fear that leaked out of all of our pores – you could almost see the gates of Heaven in that mud. Dying becomes a luxury, a treat – living is to suffer and only know more pain – living to see the future deletes your future, erases your fate and becomes absurd, stranger than praying to God that you choke on that mud in your sleep.

And suddenly, it was like we gained some new holy understanding – that we had been let into the world's big secret; the gun in my hands became an extension of my very being. I did not feel remorse of murder in Ypres, watching my platoon take their last stand in the barbed wire that embraced them, hopes and dreams shrugged off in the trenches no less than an hour before. The bullets kissed them to sleep. Oh, I saw them again – in a pile on a wagon, peace – relief, even – pouring from their blood-splattered corpses.

_(He pauses, a thoughtful expression on his face as he prepares to continue.)_

What is the true sound of loss? Screaming and crying, repeated denial? Maybe to some, those who haven't seen what I have seen. But the true sound of loss is silence; maybe it's the desire ingrained into all human beings to not want to be interrupted – even amongst the guns and the bombs and the bullets, each and every death was a pocket of silence. Each death feels like a dagger in the lungs, a sharp pain that demands to be felt. Eventually, after enough killing and mourning, you become anaesthetised to the feeling. Every fallen comrade, every friend's last breath – all numb. All guarded and blocked, carefully filed into a mental box. Sent to the darkest and most unexplored corners of the mind and forgotten about.

You quickly learn that if there is a quietness about the front line, then something is very wrong; Ypres taught me to find beauty in the yells of superior ranking officers, to find contentment in the incessant gunfire, to find peace in the storms and heavy rainfall of shells. They say you find comfort in repetition, and the same can be said for war. If you kill enough people, you begin to forget about it, revel in the routine assassination of the 'enemy'.

_(The soldier readies himself to conclude his speech, standing upright once more, straightening his cap and brushing imaginary dirt from his medals.)_

I have seen many men come and go, either killed in action or sent back to the hospitals stationed far away from the Hell that is the battlefield, and one thing remains true: those who attempt to picture war, to imagine the agonising inferno that was the Great War, the so-called War to End All Wars, will only ever be able to call up a garbled and glorified version of the nightmarish truth.

_(The lights gradually fade to black.)_


End file.
